Word: rongji
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Life seems different when you are looking down the barrel of a gun--more focused, urgent. That is the way Zhu Rongji, China's Premier, likes it. Zhu, 70, is a risk taker, a breed apart in the Chinese leadership. In Beijing they call him Zhu Fengzi, Madman Zhu, as he crashes through the rickety communist superstructure in the name of reform, laying off millions of workers from state-owned enterprises, terrorizing corrupt officials, having smugglers shot. On a good day they call him Zhu Laoban, Zhu the Boss, the only man capable of imposing order on an economy...
...mansions in old China. Descended from Zhu Yuanzhang, the first Ming-dynasty Emperor (1368-98), the Zhu clan was a big landowner around Changsha in Hunan province, where Zhu was born in 1928. "The Zhu family was very rich," says Zhu Yunzhong, 66, a retired doctor and Zhu Rongji's cousin. "That caused many of them problems after the revolution--even myself...
...Premier Zhu Rongji on Monday prepared for his visit to the U.S. next week at a press conference where he dismissed the nuclear secrets issue as a fabrication. "The press conference was a dry run for Zhu, preparing him for the challenge of putting on his best smile and reaching out to Congress and the American people to dispel doubts over China's intentions," says Florcruz. But a leader who learned his politics in a one-party system with a fawning press corps may find that dispelling doubts in Washington demands more than a smile...
Jiang's real focus, however, is not on these issues. It is on the domestic economy. He, Premier Zhu Rongji and the leadership around them are worried that without continued high growth, China might revert to the chaos he witnessed during the Cultural Revolution. "It's the economy, stupid!" could just as easily be Jiang's mantra as Clinton's. His prescription--which sometimes strikes me as too much of a contradiction in terms to work--is for a "socialist market economy," in which free markets and free ideas are encouraged until things get boisterous or too messy. Then central...
...Rongji is a good man, honest, with good ideas," says a mid-level government official in Suzhou, a city 50 miles west of Shanghai. "But even he is too weak to take on all the problems in China." The official then details the extent of corruption, inefficient industry, nepotism and financial chaos that plague his city, a microcosm of the mess China is in. Top cadres routinely "steal" houses for their children, he says, while others divert business loans to their own accounts and then walk away from the repayments. "It goes right to the top. The local party secretary...